I find it kind of a pants on head retarded move by LL to ban someone who sinks so much money into their dieing game, someone who runs a place that they use to promote their dieing game, someone helps them fix their dieing game. GG linden lab.

Anyway, Skills was always surrounded by controversy, hated by many little dicked gingers, copybotters, safe hub memester trolls and wanna be grieffer youtube stars, for basically nothing more than not bending over backwards to these people and taking it up the ass, But none of them took the time to get to know the real Skills Hak and her contribution to the game.
Skills is a great friend and we had some good times together, especially when we moved to cumboy canyon (later named poop cuz lindens dont like cum). Skills gave us a fantasy land of our own where we could all gather to circle jerk and let out creativity flow free, cumming up with hilarious sim build ideas, new creative ways to kill clueless memesters wandering the sim, create whatever we wanted. We had a blast with all those sim builds and none of that would have been possible without Skills. You say you want to be a mommy now, but you always were our mommy <3

This ban means those fun days are now over, we will miss it but life goes on, and maybe theres some more good times to be had ahead, who knows, but i feel too tired to invest any more of my time and effort into playing this game and building something, especially when it all can just be taken away from you like that whenever LL pleases.

So theres a lot of talk about the upcoming patch that will break SL visually, so i think its time for me to rant about it too.

So we all know how laggy and unplayable SL can be, its probably one of the biggest problems with second life today.

LL is going to do what LL does best, implement a half assed fix for a symptom instead of fixing the cause of the problem, optimizing the viewer, fixing how it handles video memory, making the viewer use full capabilities of your videocard’s processing power(it uses CPU to calculate and only uses GPU to draw), And maybe even making a D3D version of the client for windows users.

Anyway, this “solution” that LL came up with will undermine the whole point of mesh avatars and i suspect this will make a lot of people just quit SL in the log run. It will Automatically derender any avatars exceeding whatever arbitrary render weight setting that you or LL chooses for you by default. You wont be able to wear your fancy mesh outfits, bodies and heads without being visually muted for everyone around you, you will have to go back to using the linden body and linden avatar body and its crappy body paint clothing layer. (It will tell you when you are muted though)

Current problem with render weight calculation is that it sums up everything, including the LOD for every object you wear(LODs that the game doesnt even use because of a rigged mesh LOD bug), instead of what your video card has to actually draw on your screen. This calculation is horribly inaccurate, it doesnt tell you what actually makes you lag, and people just abuse the rigged mesh LOD bug to cheat the render weight count.
To calculate real render weight, the viewer would need to calculate it in real time and only the things your video card has to actually render, anything else added to that just undermines the whole calculation. You can look at a perfectly fine avatar low polygon avatar that for some reason has an absurd render wight and not lag looking at it, and you can look at an avatar that has an excessive amount of polygons but abuses the LOD bug that makes it have a low render weight, and it makes your viewer go 5 frames per second (People cheat render weight by using single triangles for all the LODs)

So here’s what i think should happen first before this feature is implemented.

The rigged mesh LOD bug has to be fixed, currently the game doesnt use LODs and displays the same high detail model on all distances, this, apart from texture memory issues, is what they should be focusing on if they really want to fix the lag.

The render weight calculation has to be done in real time and only count things that are being rendered, if this is not possible to do without rewriting the whole code, at least make the render weight calculation only count the high detail objects and not the LODs because its absurd, your wearing 1 object at the time, not all 4 different detail versions of it.

Btw one legit benefit of this jelly baby feature is that it would make graphics crashers impossible, instead of implementing this to the UI, they should instead just leave it in the debug settings menu but set it to a certain max amount by default so that it would still show everyone correctly but at the same time would automatically derender any graphics crashers.

The thing in their announcement that got me excited the most was “We’re upgrading support for mesh import: an upcoming Viewer update will allow uploading models that have more than eight unique faces” This would open up so many new possibilities for mesh, it would let me optimize the shit out of the av2, kemono and M3, and remove all sorts of frustrating, dead end limitations on what can be done, it would make my work so much easier and let me focus on creation instead of figuring out ways around those limitations. I finally had my respect back for LL.

But then…..

The public beta notes came and “Using these new features, models with more than 8 unique faces can be imported. Gone are the days of importing complicated meshes in pieces with “some assembly required”. At import, these models are automatically split into pieces so that each satisfy the current face limits for a volume.”

This is fucking, pants on head retarded, this wont allow us to upload models with more than 8 faces, this will just automatically break them up into separate models, with you having no control over how its done, just like their lazy ass LOD and physics generation algorithms. And the part about “some assembly required” There was no assembly required! you could upload linksets of separate mesh objects in one go. You had full control on how your mesh in your 3D editor of choice and upload them as linksets, instead of giving it to a crappy algorithm that does it whatever random manner. This new “feature” is just fucking stupid and meaningless and will only enable people who have no idea what the fuck they are doing, to hit up the game even more with their terrible, unoptimized wastes of polygons.

So yeah, well done LL, once again you did absolutely nothing and made us all think you are doing something to move the fucking game forward.